Sometime between 9 and 11am, six days a week, since 1978, George opens up his tiny shop just off Camden High Street.

If you’re early and he finds you on the pavement, waiting for him to arrive, you’ll still have to sit outside for ten minutes. Watching him through the door as he puts on his dust coat, lights up the roaster, filling it with the first batch of beans of the day.

So when you walk in, as George retreats betweens the counter, the shop is already pungent with the smell of roasting coffee.

You can choose from nine types of beans. Nothing else. The most popular one kept behind the counter to save George from reaching over. You can’t buy a coffee to drink, or cups or presses, just coffee, as beans. He will grind them for you. That’s it. Hand roasting daily and grinding on demand. Poured into a rubber stamped brown paper bag. The best coffee on sale in London.

I’ll admit to be quite shallow and buying books because I like the jacket, sometimes the blurb will put me off, other times not. A jacket with a good title? Pretty much a given.

I saw a copy of Rowena Macdonald’s “Smoked meat” face up on the display table in a book shop (yes, another admittance of shallowness, no shelf browsing for me), and was immediately tempted.

A series of interconnected stories, think the way Robert Altman threaded together Raymond Carver’s stories for “Short Cuts”. The first features a nude life drawing model, reading the author biography it turns out that Rowena Macdonald drew on experience, having modelled herself.

As humans we see patterns where none exist, but that has never stopped me from acting from our mind’s compulsion to see order in the flux. Ostensively my “Novelists” series is loosely corralled around documenting the so called “off beat” scene, as labelled by 3AM magazine. Reading signs like tasseomancy, it turns out they’ve interviewed her.

Rowena, once convinced that I wasn’t requiring her to pose naked kindly agreed to have her portrait taken. And here it is.

She also thinks “Another girl, another planet” is the greatest pop song written. A fact I could only argue with if you claimed “Teenage kicks” was.

The greatest dishonour the Hollywood studio system has brought us is making the writer unsung. Once storytellers were revered as magi, lore keepers. In a culture where fame equates to a face’s screen-time, some portraiture to rebalance the wordsmith as hero.

Like this:

Back in 2011 I was asked to write a piece for the inaugural edition of Rong Wrong – a literary magazine on the nature of language. I never received a copy and recently noticed the web site’s gone offline. One can only hazard that any viewing is now confined to the shelves and drawers of those who brought a copy.

nthposition — the very fine online literary site — decided that they would like to publish it in the absence of other outlets.

Dog-ear — or Donkey-ear if you’re German — or Pig-ear if you’re South African — is a bookmark that thinks like a magazine, or a magazine that can used as a bookmark. Either way, like the equally wonderful Matchbook Stories, it’s a object that proves the maxims “more than a mouthful goes to waste” and my favourite “a simple idea done well”.

Nine panels, each with a cherry picked short story, poem or illustration to stop you folding the page down. I eat with my elbows on the table. I drink cappuccinos after eleven. I have even poured white wine into a glass that previously held red. But the line is very firmly drawn at creasing the page corner over. Thank you Pete and Joe.

It’s free from stockists listed on the site, or being egalitarian a printable pdf is provided to make your own. The Tattered Page Liberation Front starts here.

For those wondering, Matchbook Stories is the creation of Kyle Petersen who publishes a super short story of not more than 300 characters inside a matchbook cover. I would be a very happy literary arsonist but it’s impossible to get a book unless you live Stateside. No mailbag fires and Fedex wont ship matches.

My story “Foundation” was short listed for Issue one, read it on the site.

If we’re being inclusive I ought to give a shout-out to Stack, a service that posts you a fresh independent magazine once a month. The wonderfulness doesn’t stop there, like a tangerine in a Christmas stocking they are prone to popping a present into the bottom of the envelope. Which is where Dog-ear raised its head. Stack will be solving my present list come December.

Like this:

I tried to take Will Ashon’s portrait. Somehow things got mixed up and it ended as an iPhone thing. Here’s what we have to say about it…

Shorter is an app for iPhone and iPad featuring a collection of eighty nine very short stories by Will Ashon for very short trips. A random story is chosen for you to read each time the app is opened. Making it an ideal companion for travel (a story between stops) or toilet breaks.

New stories will be automatically added at unexpected moments, magically sent over the airwaves without having to download the app again, with a little red dot marking their arrival.

Will Ashon is the author of two novels “Clear Water” and “Heritage” both published by Faber and Faber. The app comes decorated with a lovely illustration by Timothy Hunt. It costs 69p, less than a penny a tale and will last longer than a Mars Bar, unless you are an exceptional slow eater.

Here’s what other people have said about it…

“…excellent value for money; the stories never disappoint with their surreal take on early 21st-century life” – Nicola Presley, The Literary Platform.Read the full review

“A dead-on depiction of early 21st Century life that soon gives way to something much wilder and stranger. The best collection of short stories I’ve read in years.” – Matt Thorne (Cherry, 8 Minutes Idle, Prince)

“Funny, smart, playful, twisted and devastatingly precise” – Peter Hobbs (The Short Day Dying, I Could Ride All Day In My Cool Blue Train)

Like this:

I discovered the work of Anna Maltz happening upon an apparent portrait of a family wearing what can only be described as knitted nude suits. The little girl examining her father’s woollen penis. The image was posted uncredited on an internet notice board accompanied by a litany of incredulous comments.

It had to have been the work of an artist – a simple and wonderfully executed concept that throws open all the moral and social contradictions in public displays of nudity. I would see it pop up again in unexpected places, each time eliciting a search to find the creator.

When Sasha Baron Cohen premiered “Bruno” in Berlin wearing a similar outfit a year later I made a concerted effort to find the artist, to express my admiration and congratulate her on finding mainstream exposure. Emailing Anna I learnt the Bruno costumes were not by her.

Artists frequently have their ideas purloined by advertising, take Gillian Wearing’s “Signs that say what you want them to say” and the Volkswagen advert by BMP DDB. In a “creative” industry not crediting a concept is ironic as well as unjust.

It’s probable Baron Cohen was unaware of her work but I would be surprised if no-one in his team had not seen the image, given the similarity in the versions. Five years had passed since Anna exhibited her suits and the emergence of the ones to promote Bruno. It seemed a shame to me that the latecomer and conceptually less brilliant version may become the one posterity remembers. So I thought a formal portrait of Anna in her creation would be in order. I must admit that I may also have had a sneaky desire to try one one for myself.

(Although we corresponded the portrait didn’t happen immediately, since, for a while, Anna thought I was asking her to pose nude. A lesson learnt and now I state clearly when propositioning artists and authors that I’m expecting them to keep their clothes on.)

Nicholas Royle not only writes wonderfully dark tales but runs Nightjar Press, a venture I much admire for doing many things well: excellent short stories; independent publishing; objects suitable for leaving as a surprise under your lover’s pillow and making things just because one can.

Of “First Novel” The Independent say “This is a novel that demands to be read more than once”. So you could say “I’m reading ‘First Novel’ for the second time”. If you wanted to.

Like this:

I once did some work for the man who designed Bluewater, which led me to read Clearwater, a book by Will Ashon. I liked it. So I wanted to take his portrait. By some curious twist of fate this translated into “shall we make an iPhone app”.

So we did.

It will be available soon from all good iTunes stores for iPad, iPhones and iThings. It features 89 very short stories by Mr Ashon and because every book needs a cover and because fate has already played a hand, why not, I thought, ask Timothy Hunt better known as Fickle Fate to draw some nice pictures for it. Which he did. Which was nice.

So there you go. My first iPhone app featuring stories from Will Ashon and a drawing by Timothy Hunt. I’ll let you know when you can buy a copy.